Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman

setting. Whereas Orwell linked processed food consumption with excessive skinniness, today’s six-foot-tall man, like most other citizens, will most likely be carrying a good few kilos of excess weight. These days, a disturbing 60 per cent of the UK population is overweight; a quarter of us are obese.

      Are we leaping to an unjustified conclusion when we lay a significant part of the blame for obesity, chronic disease and the dramatic rise in reported food allergies, at the door of processed food? There are several a priori grounds for seriously examining this possibility. Firstly, food manufacturers combine ingredients that do not occur in natural food, notably the trilogy of sugar, processed fat and salt, in their most quickly digested, highly refined, nutrient-depleted forms. Might these modern constructions be addictive? That proposition is gaining airtime. Secondly, manufactured foods often contain chemicals with known toxic properties – although we are reassured that at low levels, this is not a cause for concern. Thirdly, the processed food industry has an ignoble history of actively defending its use of controversial ingredients, such as partially hydrogenated oils, long after well-documented, subsequently validated, suspicions have been aired.

      The precautionary principle doesn’t seem to figure prominently in the convenience food industry’s calculations, and such is the lobbying power of this influential sector, it does not loom large in the deliberations of our would-be regulators either. If it did, then steering clear of manufactured products that are very likely to prejudice your health would be a lot easier. All through this book, you will read examples of potentially harmful ingredients and processes being used in food and drink manufacturing, yet statutory bodies fail to restrict them because they do not yet have full, incontestable certainty of damage.

      I would like to be able to report that the powers-that-be are working away in the best interests of the population to curb the processed food industry’s worst excesses. I would be delighted if the concerns I raise in this book could be swept away by strategic government action: better labelling, taxes on miscreant foods, and tighter industry surveillance. But I believe that hell will freeze over before the state takes radical action to protect us from the damage caused by processed food. Why? This industry is just so damn profitable.

      The bottom line here is that there are already reasonable grounds to infer that a diet heavy in processed food is bad for us. We can wait for that contention to be ‘proven’, and the activities of the companies that sell unhealthy food to be restricted, or we can start operating our own personal precautionary principle by eating less of it, and cooking more of our own food from scratch.

      This is not to say that there is no such thing as a healthy, wholesome manufactured food. I happily use many processed ingredients. Realistically, I am not likely to keep a house cow for milk, or make my own butter and cheese. Nor do I intend to grow my own grain and mill it into flour; although I know some inspiring people who do, and very much admire their commitment. I am a purchaser of bread, not a baker. I might, in a flush of enthusiasm for a new recipe, make some egg pasta from scratch, but usually, I’ll buy it in a packet. I don’t lie awake at night worrying about what effect canning might have on my anchovies or pilchards. I often grind my spices for a special dish because they are fresher and more aromatic that way, but pre-ground spices also sit usefully in my larder alongside other processed foods such as tomato paste, soy sauce, sesame oil, rosewater, olives, gherkins, oatcakes, mustard. When my mother no longer has any of her homemade marmalade or jam to give me, I’ll gladly buy some. My salads contain seeds that have been sprouted by someone other than me. Although I am intellectually enthused by the fashion for fermentation, I remain a more likely candidate for buying sauerkraut than making it. While I fully appreciate that it is possible to cure your own bacon, I’m just too lazy to try it.

      In short, I have absolutely no intention of becoming a food neurotic, or living in splendid isolation as a Trappist monk. Like most of us, I am not always in control of what I eat, so I have to settle for the best option in the circumstances. Sometimes, I might be organised enough to bring my own food on a long journey, knowing that in quality terms, it will be streets ahead of anything I can buy, not to mention cheaper. But other times I still have to pick up lunch from a takeaway, trust my local delicatessen to make a reasonable quiche or sandwich, or politely eat a meal that I would never choose. I am also a restaurant critic, reviewing everything from chains to fine dining establishments on a weekly basis. Doing this job would be impossible if I was a purist, someone who took the attitude that my body is a temple that can never be sullied by processed food in any shape or form. I do not beat myself up if I can’t meet my highest aspirations for eating good food on a daily basis. I am a pragmatist. Food is my love, not my enemy. I will not allow my professional knowledge of how it is produced to spoil my appetite for it.

      Yet what I choose to eat and drink starts from the over-arching principle that natural ingredients in their least processed forms have an inbuilt, effortless integrity that make them the best basis for a body and soul-sustaining life. Natural foods are brilliantly conceived and intricate little packages wherein every nutrient works in a companionable ‘one for all, and all for one’ synergy. When we prepare and eat natural foods, their wise completeness translates into palpable health benefits. Nutritionally speaking, the whole apple does much more for us than the apple juice, or the apple crumble, or the apple and oat breakfast bar, or the apple-flavoured gum, and it’s hard to overeat whole apples. Manufactured foods, by contrast, are put together by people who, although indisputably smart and capable, do not have Nature’s all-embracing, all-seeing intelligence. This is why so many of the products manufacturers create share the capacity to shorten our lifespans.

      I honestly didn’t set out to put you off eating anything that comes in a bottle, jar, packet, tin, tube, carton or polystyrene container, but when you read about certain practices and procedures used to make some of our most popular foods, this might somewhat dull your appetite for a few products. My message is not the comfortable one that the UK Department of Health wants to convey with its ‘eatwell plate’, which conspicuously promotes many popular processed foods and drinks – sweets, biscuits, cake, cornflakes, baked beans, flavoured yoghurts, sliced white bread, even a can of cola, and crisps – as part of a ‘balanced diet’. Nor are the sentiments that run through this book in tune with the ‘Don’t Cook, Just Eat!’ campaign so loudly promoted by purveyors of fast food, with eye-grabbing posters in the windows of takeaways up and down the land. Their self-styled ‘anti-cooking manifesto’ urges us to ‘liberate’ ourselves from its ‘tyranny’ by letting ‘professionals do the work’.

      Leave food to the professionals? Once you have digested the information in the pages that follow, you may understand why I am unable to oblige. Somehow, I feel more affinity with the message of the mysterious graffiti artist in Cologne who superimposes his or her own home cooking recipes on fast-food billboards, so that instead of seeing a Big Mac advert, for example, passers-by will spot the ingredients needed to make spaghetti with meat sauce, or a courgette rice casserole. These days, cooking is a powerful political statement, a small daily act of resistance that gives us significantly more control of our lives.

PART ONE

How the processed food system works

1

       Why it all tastes the same

      I am not a fan of convenience food, a sentiment rooted in a formative early experience. As a small child in the 1960s, I was captivated by the TV advert for one of the first generation of ready meals: the Vesta chicken curry. I seem to remember that it had beautiful sari-clad dancing girls, and all the thousand-and-one-nights exoticism so sumptuously on show in Alexander Korda’s spectacular film, The Thief of Bagdad. Revisiting the Vesta advert now, with a more cynical adult eye, it would doubtless look laughably lame, but at the time, it had me spellbound.

      In my home we ate almost no convenience food. Either my mother or grandmother cooked, more or less from scratch; this was the way most people ate until the 1970s. So I waged a long, attritional campaign to buy Vesta chicken curry, exercising what food advertisers now call ‘pester power’. Neither the adults in the